Quantifying ruggedness of continuous landscapes using entropy

A major unsolved problem in the field of optimisation and computational intelligence is how to determine which algorithms are best suited to solving which problems. This research aims to analytically characterise individual problems as a first step towards attempting to link problem types with the algorithms best suited to solving them. In particular, an information theoretic technique for analysing the ruggedness of a fitness landscape with respect to neutrality was adapted to work in continuous landscapes and to output a single measure of ruggedness. Experiments run on test functions with increasing ruggedness show that the proposed measure of ruggedness produced relative values consistent with a visual inspection of the problem landscapes. Combined with other measures of complexity, the proposed ruggedness measure could be used to more broadly characterise the complexity of fitness landscapes in continuous domains.

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